1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention pertains generally to minimizing the amount of ink utilized to generate a barcode, yet increasing the readability of the reduced-ink barcode by using a truly “more-for-less” ink application technique.
2. Description of Related Art
In the conventional printing of barcodes, in general, and datamatrix (2-D) barcodes, in particular, the area comprising such a barcode contains a combination of elemental regions, where each such elemental region is completely filled by either the foreground or background color (e.g., black foreground and white background). The dimension of a barcode's elemental regions is commonly referred to as the “x-dimension” and is commonly expressed in thousandths of an inch, also known as “mils”. For example, a datamatrix barcode with an x-dimension of 0.02 inches is referred to as a 20-mil barcode. FIG. 1 (PRIOR ART) illustrates an ideal printed result for this existing technique.
Printed output from many industrial ink-jet printers is frequently prone to a “splatter” effect in which stray drops of ink are present in non-print areas that border the intended print. Such ink splatter produces barcodes in which foreground elements encroach upon neighboring background elements. While the datamatrix format is very robust, a significant amount of ink splatter can considerably degrade readability of a barcode when the barcode being printed is small in size. Under such conditions, the distinction between some foreground and background elements is lost or diminished, as shown in FIG. 2 (PRIOR ART).
In the ink-jet printing process, each elemental region of a datamatrix barcode is typically composed of an array of ink-dot locations. For example, printing a 20-mil barcode on an ink-jet printer with 300-dot-per-inch resolution would cause each of the barcode's foreground elements to contain 6 ink dots by 6 ink dots. To further illustrate, FIG. 3 (PRIOR ART) shows an ideal close-up representation of nine region elements within a conventionally printed datamatrix barcode. In FIG. 3, each element is composed of 36 ink-dot locations in a 6×6 configuration. The five foreground (dark) elements have all 36 of their ink-dot locations filled.